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Logo Guidelines for Custom Headwear:

How to Prepare Your Artwork for Flawless Embroidery

Getting your logo onto a custom cap is exciting, but there’s a big difference between a logo that looks great on a computer screen and one that looks great stitched into fabric. Embroidery is a physical process using actual thread, which means your digital artwork needs to be prepped correctly to translate perfectly to the final product.

To ensure your custom headwear turns out crisp, professional, and exactly as you envisioned, please follow these essential artwork guidelines before sending your files to our design team.

Keep It Simple: Shapes and Colors

Embroidery machines stitch with solid threads. They cannot blend colors or create gradients the way a printer or a digital screen can.
Use solid shapes only.
Use solid colors only.
No photographic imagery, gradients, or color blends.

If your logo relies on fading colors or photo-realistic details, it will need to be simplified into solid blocks of color for embroidery.

Font Formatting and Sizing

Text can be tricky in embroidery. To ensure your lettering is legible and stitches cleanly, we have specific size and formatting requirements:

  • Outline Your Fonts: All text in your artwork must be converted to outlines (or curves). This embeds the font shape into the file, meaning you don’t have to send over the actual font files, and we guarantee the text won’t shift or change.
  • Minimum Height: For flat embroidery, uppercase letters must be a minimum of 10mm high, and lowercase letters must be a minimum of 8mm high. Anything smaller will become a tangled, illegible mess of thread.
  • Side Logos: Space is limited on the side panels. Keep side logos to a maximum of 10 characters per line.

Object and Line Thickness

Thread has physical width. If a line in your logo is too thin, the machine can’t stitch it properly. If it’s too thick, it can cause the fabric to pucker or make the front of the cap uncomfortably stiff.

Minimum thickness: 2mm for any shape or line.
Maximum thickness: 10mm for any shape or line.
Outlines: If you want to outline an object in a different color, the outline thickness must also fall strictly between 2mm and 10mm.

Backgrounds Must Be Transparent

We only want to stitch your logo, not the white (or black) square box it sits in. Ensure your artwork has a transparent background so our digitizers know exactly where the logo begins and ends.

Accepted File Formats

The quality of your output is only as good as the quality of your input.

  • Highly Recommended: Vector graphics files (AI, PDF, EPS). Vector files are infinitely scalable and provide the cleanest lines for our digitizers to work with.
  • Acceptable Alternative: If you do not have vector files, high-resolution raster graphics (PNG) can be used, but only if the resolution is at least 300 DPI at the actual size it will be embroidered.
  • Not Accepted: We do not accept embroidery file types (like .DST or .PES) that you have digitized yourself. Professional headwear digitizing requires specific knowledge of stitch angles, pull compensation, and fabric behavior. Leave the digitizing to our experts!

The Bottom Line: When in Doubt, Ask!

We know that graphic design and embroidery digitizing are two completely different skill sets. If you’re unsure whether your logo meets these guidelines, send it to us anyway.

Our experienced design team will review your artwork, let you know if it needs simplification, and guide you through the process to ensure your custom caps look absolutely flawless.

Ready to get started?
Email your logo and enquiry to cappingsa4u@gmail.com and let’s bring your brand to life.

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